Scream
by Cassie Jamie
Summary: His knee screamed...
1. Part One

Disclaimer: Not mine.

-*-*-

Scream

Part One

-*-*-

            His knee screamed at him as he brushed inside the fated store, decried the agony within the bone and joint.

            But he couldn't stop.  No.  He wouldn't give into the pain that wished him to go back to whence he came.  He couldn't go back, though he knew he'd be facing Van Doren soon enough – and she had fully realized what the little looks and touches meant.

            He had to get to Samantha.  Before she bled out, before she went white-sheet pale and her heart struggled to pump the life-giving crimson in endless circulation through her lithe body.

            Somehow, through a divine action he thinks, he made it to the blonde, who tried her best to restrain the mutinous tears.  He brushed a hand over her forehead, gauging the look on her features for the hurt he knew was lurking in the murky depths.

            His knee screamed at him as he lifted her from the ground that was quickly becoming her last resting place.  It threatened to buckle under the weight of her in his arms.  He wanted to yell at it, let it know it couldn't do anything yet because he had to get her out of this soon-to-be-vacancy or lose her forever.

            And he couldn't imagine a life empty of her vivaciousness, her stubbornness…

            Hope rose in his gut.  But she was quiet, and he wondered briefly if she was still breathing.

            He felt a gasp of air against his shoulder.

            Out the door and to the bench, he knew she'd been taken care of posthaste.  Taken care of while he grappled with a man for the last strings of sanity and his knee screamed at him.

-*-*-

*v* Cassie Jamie *v*

FindUs@cassie-jamie.com


	2. Part Two

-*-*-

Scream

Part Two

-*-*-

            Her leg screamed at her as she sat in her hospital bed, eyes glistening with tired tears forced from exertion.  From trying to make it to the bathroom without assistance and falling so miserably, the nurses had to call one of the doctors to lift her from the cold, linoleum floor.

            At least the carpet had given her some relief from both the warm-hot-sticky air around her and the lack-of-blood chill which echoed through her semi-broken being.

            Martin and Danny had visited her together three days before, Vivian too later that same day.  They all said the same thing when she begged for Jack.

            Jack wasn't around; the Assistant Director of the field office didn't even know where the man was.  And, as the physical therapist worked her leg repeatedly, she hoped that his month-long absence wasn't to be feared.

            Yet her belly still ached with something uniquely unidentifiable.

            The tears continued to roll glistening down her cheeks, while her leg continued to scream at her.  She knew he had gone against Van Doren, gone against Bureau protocol, just gone against everything.  God, she hoped that he had not delved into the harsh backlash he was sure to feel within his soul.

            She knew he had a plan.

            Outside her door, she could not hear the sound of people rushing to one room, couldn't even see the person in the other portion of the ICU who was flat-lining.

            She was safe inside with her heart pounding listlessly against her ribs, with her leg screaming at her because the morphine had worn off and left her settled against the pillows crying because the exertion had drained her.

            The door opened and she could hear the machines down the hall detect a heartbeat once more, the personnel and staff dispersing.

            A voice called her name soft; she could swear it was his, except it was Martin, returning to say that Marie had come down to the office.  Jack was now a case, but after all the time that had passed between the last time anyone had seen him, shirt undone and blood – _her blood – smeared on it, and the actual filing of the report…_

            She looked at him finally.  Her tone left no argument as she implored him to leave.  Because Jack wasn't a case, of that she was quite sure.  He was lost, and he didn't want to be found.  Yet.

            He was hiding, licking his wounds.  Biding time and trying to deal with what had occurred, because it hadn't been another laying on the ground.

            It had been her, and he didn't know how to deal with that knowledge.

            However she knew he'd come back with a new resolve, his heart more guarded than before whenever he signed away his marriage.  He would come back and distance himself from her.  Her and the leg that screamed.

            Her recently-appointed psychologist walked in, sent there by the worries of her medical team.  Because she didn't smile nor laugh nor talk as much as they all would like.

            The questions began like they always did and the nightmare flashes before her eyes.

            The gun.

            The blood.

            The pain.

            Jack.

            All in shifts, etched into her consciousness like the tattoo her ex-husband has on his upper arm.

            Her leg screamed louder at her, and she deftly wondered if the images will ever go away, if she'll ever feel safe in slumber.

-*-*-

*v* Cassie Jamie *v*

FindUs@cassie-jamie.com


	3. Part Three

-*-*-

Scream

Part Three

-*-*-

            His head screamed as he sat against the headboard of the cheesy, off-the-highway motel.  The bedspread stunk of cheap liquor, the nightstand was unsteady on three legs and a tennis ball, while the pillows were riddled with holes.

            Little puncture marks like the ones bullets have left in their wake when they pierce malleable and yielding flesh.

            He looked to the phone, expected it to ring, but not surprised in the least when it didn't.  He knew that someone had probably noticed his exorbitant amount of time off was totally something akin to resignation, that his picture was stuck up on the back side of the DOD timeline board and his friends searching every nuance of his life to find him among the millions of U.S. citizenry.

            Logic sternly ordered him to, if nothing else, leave a message for Maria or at his office or for Samantha.  Yet he didn't because he knew the minute his soon-to-be ex-wife answered the incessant phone beeping, she'd argue with him and guilt him; the minute the operator picked up, he'd be transferred to someone who'd defiantly drag the information out of him.

            Tired and brokenhearted, he cut the idea from his thought process and sniffled.

            Refused to cry for himself.

            He was confused.  Befuddled.  Frustrated and exhausted.  So many emotions at once, he couldn't deal.  The memories conquered his mental state, dredged up in the turmoil of it all.  They were hazy red.

            Tinted the color of her blood.

            His head fell into his hands, while he tried to contain the tears.

            Sudden, he swore he felt her fingers comb through his dark, tumbled hair, which was flat to his scalp due to the reduction in his self-care.  His body prickled with sensation. His eyes watered.

            He lifted his chin to stare into the empty and blackened room.  She was not there.  She was not seated at the lone chair near the pale-green desk-slash-dinner table, nor was she watching the black and white television from the stained and lumpy couch.  Samantha was not dipping the bed when she slipped beneath the covers.

            He was alone.

            Isolated from everyone and everything.

            At least that's what his mind chose to relay in high, pitched tones that sounded suspiciously like Hanna.  It screamed for authority while he balled himself up, his cheeks resting between his knees as he laid on his side and his hands pressed tight to his ears.

-*-*-

*v* Cassie Jamie *v*

FindUs@cassie-jamie.com


	4. Part Four

-*-*-

Scream

Part Four

-*-*-

            Her head screamed at her as she left the hospital clutching Danny's arm; while Vivian followed behind with her suitcase and flowers and Martin stood to the blonde's other side, ensuring she did not fall.

            Because there was someone missing and he wasn't supposed to be.

            Another week added to the month.  He was gone five solitary weeks with no assurances that he still breathed.

            It scared her, but there was nothing more she could do or say to force his reappearance to the world he knew – the world he had built for himself and his team.

            She wondered where the hell he was as they placed her into the Toyota Celica, threw her bag in the trunk.  Her brain reeled over the possibilities.  He could have hid at any number of places along the expansive highway system, at the house of one of his college buddies or an old Army colleague from the 82nd, or with an odd family member she'd never heard of.

            Hundreds of sites.

            She huffed the humid summer air.

            The indentured vehicle began a lazy drive toward her apartment.  She knew they all wished to be graced with her insight into Jack Malone's psyche, but there was little she could tell them.  True, she knew much more than she ever let on, yet that little voice in her head screamed out that he deserved time.

            Her worry multiplied in her belly.

            A soft sun-shower melted at the extreme temperature, pelting the windows like diamonds shattering.  Like dreams ending.

            Someone spoke but she didn't hear them.  She only saw her memories play wisps across her eyes, listened to his voice rake across her eardrums, and remembered the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips.

            Her cellphone trilled its demand; Vivian lifted it.

            Samantha's mother.  Whom she ignored, shaking her head and stating that she'd call back later.

            More indeterminable silence, more refusal to speak for fear of turning her anger outward.  Her therapist's warning, she was quite sure, involved something of the like and her coworkers were taking the advice.  Causing them to continue toward her homely apartment uttering nothing until they reached the parking spot designated F-12.

            There Martin stirred her, laid a hand on her shoulder and gently shook.

            She ran a hand through her hair.  Trying to extract the racing ideas from her frontal lobe, then shuffled ahead of her friends to slam through her first floor apartment door.

            Her answering machine blinked in systolic rhythm.  The number thirty-nine glowed in fabulous chartreuse.

            Hesitantly, she tapped the playback.

            Almost immediately, her heart leapt, hearing Jack's voice.  But the electronic male informed her that the first message was dated two days after the shooting at the bookstore.  The ones that followed were telemarketers, her bank, friends who'd seen the news but didn't know enough to call her cell phone…

            And one more connection from the day just recently ended.

            His tone broke, skewed, and shaved to a trickle.  She could hear the tension in his body, as he asked her to pick up if she was there.  When she failed to have picked up, he sighed, whispered something indecipherable before hanging up with a deafening click.

            Martin recovered the quickest – taking her machine as well as Danny, ducking out of her living room and heading for the car.

            The message flitted through her mind again.  And again.  Her heart reeling at the image it created.  The horrid visage of a degraded Jack, his face unshaven and his hair grown an inch too long.  Clothes dirty and torn, sleeping in a dilapidated bed lacking sheets with a bottle of cheap liquor in one hand.

            She shook her head suddenly, stirring the unlikely thought from her head.  She knew he would never steep that low.  No, she was sticking to her decisive argument that he was hiding with someone and taking his time-out from the real world.

            That he would be back soon.

            That he would return to help her deal with the nightmare-dreams that always ended the same way, that always ended with him dead because he just had to push.  Had to push until the gun was pressed to his forehead.

            Once more, she shook her blonde hair into a whorl-wind.  She only then noticed that Vivian was gone, leaving her in the solitude of a now-strange home.

            Her heart thudded dully, reminding her she was still alive, while she tilted her head to her hands to rub away the mutinous tears.

            She won't cry.

            Because he wasn't missing.

            And her mind clung to that fallacy like water to the thirty.

-*-*-

*v* Cassie Jamie *v*


End file.
